Astrium, South Korea To Produce GOCI-II Satellite System

Astrium has recently signed a contract with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), to jointly design and manufacture the Geostationary Ocean Color Imager II (GOCI-II) for the future Korean mission GEO Kompsat 2B.

The GOCI-II instrument, designed to provide detailed observations of the colour of the seawater, will contribute to a number of services associated with fishing, ecology and meteorology. It will, for example, be able to determine the amount of chlorophyll in the water, differentiate plankton species, identify algae proliferations and determine available fishing resources.

GOCI-II is the next generation to the GOCI first generation imager onboard the COMS satellite. GOCI was also developed by Astrium and has been successfully operated by the South Korean space agency since its launch in 2010. GOCI-II offers significant advances in comparison to GOCI: enhanced resolution (250 metres), 12 spectral bands and daily coverage of full disk Earth data.

GOCI-II has been designed using the latest generation technologies developed by Astrium for space applications, including a seven-million pixel CMOS sensor, a silicon carbide telescope and a high-precision pointing mechanism.

The contract signed with KARI also stipulates that six Korean engineers will help to develop the instrument at the Astrium site in Toulouse. Astrium has agreed to use South Korean industrial services amounting to 5% of the contract price. In addition, test resources made available by KARI at its Daejeon site in Korea will be used for environment testing. It is scheduled to be launched in the year 2019.